Set out runnin but I take my time
A friend of the devil is a friend of mine
If I get home before daylight, I just might get some sleep tonight.
Ran into the devil, babe, he loaned me twenty bills
I spent the night in utah in a cave up in the hills.
Set out runnin but I take my time, a friend of the devil is a friend of mine,
If I get home before daylight, I just might get some sleep tonight.
I ran down to the levee but the devil caught me there
He took my twenty dollar bill and vanished in the air.
Set out runnin but I take my time
A friend of the devil is a friend of mine
--The Grateful Dead
There is a farm about a mile away from my house. There is a gravel road that runs along one side of this farm. I often run along this road with my dogs, and a few days ago while I was running I saw an old man out in his garden tending to some peas. I stopped and said hello and said, "I'm growing some peas in my garden but they're not doing as well as yours." In an accent that I later learned was Turkish, he said back, "Come one day this week after school. I will go to your house and show you how you get peas like this."
This afternoon I learned that this small man might not be so innocent. |
| Today after school I got my dogs, my mom, and some clothes I didn't mind getting dirty and I walked over to this man's house. We set out back to my house.
He told me his name was Ahmet and he moved here from Turkey in the '60s. He was a designer, he designed hospitals. He consulted the first black mayor of New York City and he consulted Ed Koch on healthcare-related issues, although I'm not sure exactly what. His house, it turns out, was designed by a student of Frank Loyd Wright and is the exact same model as the one that was famously shown to Khrushchev. This man got more and more interesting by the minute.
As he came into my garden, he immediately told me that the lighting was all wrong. It lacked planning, he said, and I replied that I could only blame that on my father who originally planted the garden. The garden does not get enough sunlight and the rows of peas were facing downhill, a terrible mistake. The grass mulch I was using should have been mixed into the soil instead of spread on top of it, and he gave me instructions on how I should plant my tomato plants. He was excited that I had chickens because he said he grew up with chickens.
And then we got back to talking about his life again. Apparently, he is currently working on a farming project in Africa. He said he has been to Nigeria a few times and has seen thousands of people pathetically commuting through the streets to earn only a dollar a day. He wants to help them. So he is working with some "rich people" to start a project in Nigeria with biofuels, I think he said jotropha, but I didn't entirely understand what he said.
That is where it started to sound sinister. I just read a few weeks ago in Mother Jones about how Mozambique is being taken over by ethanol and land speculators and I know well the horrors of palm oil and corn ethanol. Biofuels are nothing to play around with.
Ahmet continued to talk. Turkey, he said, has a similar culture to Nigeria and the rest of northern Africa and that is why he is well-suited to work in that area. He has met with the Prime Minister of Nigeria and that group of "rich people" that he helped organize is willing to "buy half the country" in order to start the people on farming biofuels. It would help them earn more than a dollar a day, so he says, although that has not been the case in other countries where biofuels have entered the economy.
Now, I'm not sure if he just wanted the farmers to grow biofuels, but it sounded like it. He talked about how this particular plant can keep monkeys away from any farm and that as long as a country has "soil, water, and sun," it can have a booming agricultural economy. But if that includes foreigners buying up half of a country (or subsidizing fertilizers or introducing bioengineered crops or cutting down huge swaths of rainforest, as has happened other countries), then it's most definitely not worth it. It could be a short term fix for a minority of a single country's economic problems, but for the general human population, future generations in that country, and future generations around the world, it will most likely do nothing but hurt them.
So was this man telling the truth? Is his plan likely to happen, if it's real? Is he a benevolent philanthropist or a scheming, devilish power-hungry imperialist? I don't know. But I'll definitely be interested when I meet with him again next week. |
